


Or, What You Will

by reine_des_corbeaux



Category: Seeing Other People - Belle & Sebastian (Song)
Genre: Angst, Boarding School, M/M, Mutual Pining, Sexual Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 07:27:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24347224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux
Summary: Oliver just wants to practice for his future relationships. Henry, on the other hand, thinks his feelings might run deeper.
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Comments: 8
Kudos: 6
Collections: Jukebox 2020





	Or, What You Will

**Author's Note:**

  * For [morganya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/morganya/gifts).



If, six months previously, Henry Shelton had known he would be here, in this narrow dormitory bed, curled against Oliver Forsythe as if he were the last warm thing on Earth, he would have slapped the past self who told him so, and called such a premonition only idle dreaming. Now, he still sometimes feels as though he should pinch himself, wake himself up and find himself alone in his own cold bed. He used to dream about this, about what has become so utterly, familiarly ordinary to him, and after years of dreaming, here he is. By rights, it all should still be fantasy. For all that he is happy, Henry is all too cognisant of how it could always disappear, and he could be left with only the memory of how Forsythe-- how _Oliver--_ smells, the clean carbolic soap scent, the ink, the sweat. He’ll always hold on to the way Oliver can look at a person with such kindness, until they melt open for him at last, in love with being loved. 

Oliver turns to look at him now, half dressed, sweating (and is that a hint of lust in his eyes?), and Henry smiles at him, even though it pinches his heart to do so. He gently strokes a tentative hand across Oliver’s chest. 

Everything is perfect, and everything is wrong. 

Oliver cups Henry’s chin, brings him in for a kiss, and there’s no passion in it, or not the right kind of passion, because this is all a bit of playacting-- stagecraft for schoolboys, so let’s light the footlights for another round of a show with no audience, gentlemen. In all this, Oliver is Rosalind-as-Ganymede, except there’s no Orlando in the end for him, because he has no disguise. Oliver will never write his name in poems on trees, because boys don’t do that for other boys, except in plays where they are inevitably revealed to be girls, and everything can go on to its appropriate conclusion of happy matrimony. 

Henry doesn’t think he wants that. He hasn’t since Oliver came here to the Cardew School, and since he once, smiling, offered to reteach him the declension he’d missed in class when he was too sick to move and they’d talked of sending him home to recover or die. When they sat in the darkened common room as the rain lashed the windows and the night wind grew cold, they’d laughed and laughed until Ramsey, the worser of the two house prefects, came to tell them off, and that they’d both be caned if they didn’t go off to bed instantly. But Henry had learned the third declension, and he’d made a friend. 

That was how it went for days and days, and all through the years down to now, the path of time finding them at last in a cold and narrow bed, terrified that at any moment, a prefect might find them, or a master, or any other busybody boy who hasn’t known any of the sweet agonies of lust with his fellows. So they lie in Oliver’s bed, or sometimes in Henry’s, and they cover the window as best they can and try to keep all sounds to a low minimum. That’s how they do it. That’s how you practice, in order to get the best of both worlds without ever making a choice. 

*** 

Oliver was the one to suggest it first, after a disastrous visiting day six months previously, when they were both sixteen (and edging towards seventeen is what frightens Henry most, because he only has a few years of shelter and plausible deniability left to him). Once he’s in the world, because he cannot bear to be a schoolmaster or a scholar, there will be precious few opportunities left to him. A happy wife. A quiet home. Two children, perfect in form. And on the off nights, a sojourn in the park, and the heft of a guardsman’s cock in his hand. This is the future awaiting Henry. It does not await Oliver. 

“Henry,” Oliver said, worrying his pen between two fingers as if it were some sort of talisman, “I am hopeless.” 

They were in a classroom, though they weren’t supposed to be, Oliver sitting on a desk, moping at him about Henry’s sister. Henry wanted to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, and that Agatha turned everyone down, but most specifically schoolboys. When she’d begun at university, she’d embraced every insult thrown at her, thrown herself into her studies with the zealous passion of a convert, and emerged from her first term at St. Hilda’s with little regard for any concept so frivolous as what her brother considered fun. Agatha had no time for anyone she perceived as shallow, let alone for sixteen year old schoolboys carrying on about their passions. Oliver ought to have been glad she let him away with a withering look and only a cutting “certainly not” when he’d asked to see her again. It could have been much worse. 

“You see,” Oliver said, “I have no idea how to talk to women. Young or old, or Agatha.” 

“No one knows how to talk to Agatha,” Henry said. “It’s like something went wrong when we were both conceived, and she got the interest in serious things and the aptitude for Latin and Greek, and I got the interest in theatre and botany and novels.” 

“Botany’s a perfectly good passion for a man,” Oliver said at last. “Fanshawe sends home for orchids, and you know how he is.” 

“Fanshawe never gets his orchids, and he is a notorious corruptor of younger students.” 

Oliver suddenly leaned in, interested. Now, with clarity, Henry remembers the hungry smirk on his face, so unlike his usual placid expression. Even Agatha hadn’t aroused such curiosity. He waved his hand, and said something placating about Mullins, who wasn’t in their house. Mullins, after all, had the reputation as the greatest tart at Cardew, but surely Oliver knew that. Everyone knew about Mullins and his pretty, clever mouth. He wasn’t going to say anything about how he knew about Fanshawe. He’d been more biddable at fourteen than he was now, was all. But Oliver was insistent. 

“You aren’t even friends with Mullins, and he really is more or less discreet. Why would he tell you that.” 

“It’s nothing,” Henry said at last. “Rumors, whispers. Maybe a few kisses where kisses weren’t wise.” 

Oliver nodded, solemnly, finally satisfied. 

“We never meet anyone but our fellow men in this infernal school,” he said, as though he were making a speech to all assembled, which was, of course, only him and Henry. “You have a sister, but I have only brothers, and none of them will tell me anything.” 

Privately, Henry thought he should have started figuring things out many years before. Sixteen was a hopeless age, moreso if you, like Oliver, were hopelessly ignorant of anything that might pass before you and have no resemblance to an ablative absolute. He was endearing like that- so clever in the classroom and so difficult and innocent outside. 

“So,” Oliver continued, “what are we to do when we meet women?” 

“I don’t know. What books say?” 

“There! You see, what we must do is practice.” 

“Practice?” 

“Like… Mullins. Only not with Mullins.” 

Henry’s heart leaped into his throat. He’d been watching Oliver for so long, trying to tell 

himself that his feelings for him were nothing, and that all he could do would be to watch and pine. Oliver would never notice him, but now, it seems, he did. 

“With me?” Henry asked. 

“Of course, silly. We’re friends. It’s not properly real or anything.” Oliver shrugged, and Henry’s hopeful heart sank just a little more towards his shoes. 

“All right,” he said at last. 

And that, after a bit of wrangling, was how they came to find themselves lying in Oliver’s bed. It was only practice, Oliver said, and Henry tamped down his feelings and his dreams and told himself that Oliver was right. 

*** 

Today, he doesn’t think he was. Because Oliver’s lips are soft and kind, and though he kissed horridly at first, he kisses so sweetly now. And his hands are gentle on Henry’s bare skin, raising goosebumps as Henry lies there, listening to Oliver try out new, feminine, names for him, and wishing against all hope that one day, Oliver might truly call him his own Christian name. It would be anathema, imagine the scandal, etc. etc. But Henry wants it. He wants to be Henry, not Shelton, or Sidonie, or Clarissa. He wants to be loved for who he is. Perhaps Oliver can give him that, but perhaps he cannot, and fruitless wishes can go only so far. He’s not a hero or a heroine in any of Shakespeare’s plays, and though the course of true love might not run smooth, he doesn’t think it’s running at all at the moment. How hopeless he is, carrying a torch for a boy who carries a torch for his sister. 

“Henry?” 

Henry jumps. Oliver never calls him Henry in bed, even if they’ve had their hands on each other’s pricks, even after gentle kisses. 

“Yes?” he says. “Thinking of Agatha now?” 

He punches him lightly on the shoulder. 

“No, actually. I…” 

Henry puts his finger to his lips. 

“Don’t tell me. You’ve fallen in love again with someone else’s sister, and you want to thank me for helping you like this, and of course you won’t tell anyone, because who wants to be another Mullins, etc., etc.” 

“I have,” Oliver says, and presses a tender kiss to Henry’s hand. “Oh, god, Shelton-- Henry-- forgive me. I think I’ve fallen for you.” 

It’s as simple as that. The dream comes true. True love runs smooth, or at least it will this evening. And now they’re kissing once again, and the light is golden and they are probably missing supper, and Henry doesn’t care what happens to him now. He’s dreamed about this for too long, and now it’s all real, and all true, and he and Oliver will figure things out together. He breaks the kiss, smiles. 

“Me too,” he says, and squeezes Oliver’s hand. 

**Author's Note:**

> I like to think that everything does work out for them in the end! 
> 
> Title pulled from Shakespeare, and tropes pulled shamelessly from 19th century boarding school literature.


End file.
